In times past, when the internet was new and
there was no such thing as a cell phone, I was the guru for all of my friends, for the
offices I worked for, for the family. I was the go-to person. I read computer
and software manuals like novels.,

I never got into the "guts" of the
machinery, but boy I became a whiz at any program that I used. I knew how to do
magical things with WordPerfect and amazed everyone at how effortlessly I was able to set
up complicated pages with that program.

I knew several photo manipulation software
programs and when I finally got into PhotoShop, quickly learned how to use that program,
watched endless tutorials, have attended day-long seminars.

I learned web design before anybody I
knew was doing web design -- not even David Gerrold (he actually had me help him set up
his first web page).

On the internet, I could find just about
anything I wanted to find, became queen of Google (never could understand why people
called ME to ask what I knew about something and then were so amazed at how quickly I came
up with an answer, when all I did was to put the "something" into Google).

When we got our Star Trek Communicator flip
phones several years ago, I mastered mine pretty quickly. I could whip out a text
message, add a photo, keep a calendar, set an alarm, create and assign ring tones and do a
whole host of things that the little phone could do. There were lots of things that
the phone had on its list of choices, but I didn't see any use for those, so I never used
them.

But this new smart phone is making me feel like
a first class idiot.

I learned how to change the wallpaper so
instead of the harsh metalic droid screen, I could add my own photo

(Though this is a picture
of both girls with Santa, and I couldn't figure out how to resize it to include the both
of them)

I found all sorts of fun apps to add to the phone and proudly showed them off to
Walt. They were all free apps. I was happy.

But then the problems started. My phone is allotted 300 MB of Internet data
a month. I wasn't watching it too carefully since I almost never used the phone out
of the house, so I was going through our wifi connection, not the internet, and supposedly
that didn't count against our internet data.

But suddenly the records showed that I had used almost half of the usage
allotment. I panicked. I couldn't figure out what was going on. The next
day, I used the phone hardly at all. No calls, no texts, nothing that accesses the
internet at all. Records showed that I had now used 75% of the allotment. The
data use table on the Verizon web site showed that two of the big uses were made when I
was asleep (and the phone was sitting on my desk), the other uses were made when I was at
Concetta's funeral (and not using my phone), and when I was home (supposedly going through
wifi).

I called Verizon yesterday and actually got a person who, naturally, couldn't tell
me what the problem was. She passed me along to Amanda, her supervisor. Amanda had
me change some of the settings that came with the phone (which the salesman who sold us
the phone set up for me) and said she would call me this morning.

She called at the appointed time and I told her that yesterday the only times I
had touched the phone were to send two test text messages (which supposedly have
nothing to do with any internet activity, since they are the phone) and answered
one phone call. The data usage had gone up by another chunk.

I figured that if I turned off the phone and did not use it for anything
for the rest of the month, I would still exceed my monthly allotment by whatever the phone
was doing that counted against my internet usage.

She explained a lot of things to me, none of which I understood and the bottom
line is that she is sending me a new phone, since she can't figure out why when the phone
is sitting 3 feet from our wifi source it would be accessing the internet and maybe it's a
phone glitch (but she can't reduce the usage already accumulated). She also talked
me into upping my internet usage to 2 gig from 3 MB. We figured that would cover
this month and I'd be OK after that. Maybe. It's only $10 more a month and if
it brings peace of mind, that would be worth it.

But I feel like a total idiot that I don't understand most of what exactly data
delivery is, what data saver is (though both are now turned off and that apparently is
going to help my data usage). I don't understand why if it shows me I'm using wifi,
I'm still also using internet as well, but apparently I am. I don't understand why
when programs automatically update they do it through the internet and not the wifi when
the phone is sitting less than 3' from the wifi hot spot.

I'm wondering if after all these years, the smart phone has finally turned me into
a blithering idiot. But we'll revisit this subject in the next couple of weeks after
the new phone comes.